Various styles and types of manufactured doors are utilized both in residential and commercial business construction. One widely accepted manufactured door uses molded outer door skins over a hollow core of wood or other material. This style of door is popular because of its relative ease of manufacture and use of less expensive materials as compared to solid wood doors. The molded door skin is light-weight and provides an acceptable aesthetic appearance, although not as sharply detailed as solid wood doors.
Molded door skins, while widely used, can be improved by lowering their cost of manufacture and by enhancing their appearance similar to solid wood doors. Conventional doors utilizing door skins, especially those with raised or recessed panels for styling, often do not have the crisp and sharp panel edges of machined wood due to the inherent limitations of conventional molding processes in which a single substrate is formed into a door skin by compression.
Various methods for manufacturing door skins can be found in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,702,054 shows a raised panel door having a core panel extending within it and panel inserts lodged within the voids of a lattice structure presented on opposite sides of the door. Molding strips overlay and conceal regions where the inserts abut against expanses in the lattice structure defining the voids. A veneer overlay covers margins of the molding strips.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,327,788 discloses a raised panel door for use on kitchen and vanity cabinets and the like which can be quickly and inexpensively constructed from a conventional laminated door having a core and a thin veneer facing. First, an outer molding is secured around the periphery of the laminated panel to provide a finished edge and to conceal the exposed edges of the veneer facing the core. Then, using the outer molding as a guide a rectangular groove is cut through the veneer and into the core. Finally, an inner molding adapted to fit in the groove and having a pair of opposing lips to conceal the upper edges of the groove is glued in place to complete the door.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,689,301 discloses a method of manufacturing a door skin includes the steps of providing a wood composite flat blank. The blank is placed between the platens of a heated press, the platens being heated to a temperature sufficient to soften the resins in the blank and to thereby soften the blank. Sufficient pressure is applied to close the platens and thereafter the pressure is cyclically applied to increased pressure levels for thereby causing the blank to be deformed into a molded shape determined by the configuration of the platens. The molded blank is then removed from between the platens.